Don't Fear The Reaper
April 28, 2005

While the whole world was mourning the passing of Pope John Paul II a few weeks ago, I witnessed another, lonelier little death that occurred without media coverage. Art Boy and I came home from our walk one afternoon to discover the tiny green body of a hummingbird, no bigger than a curled leaf, prostrate on our deck, after what could only have been an unfortunate encounter with our sliding glass door.

We get a lot of birds bonking into our windows; it's an unavoidable fact of modern life. Most are starlings loaded on fig juice from our nearby tree; like most drunk drivers, they tend to bounce off uninjured. At other times, birds fall stunned to the deck, but sit quietly for awhile until they regain their sense and fly off.

But this little guy was not coming back, the latest avian adventurer to mistake our sliding glass door for a portal into another realm. Which, for him, it was. And as sad as it was to find the little body on our deck, still so intact, at least we could console ourselves with one thing: it was probably a quick death.

Lingering on his deathbed, Charles II of England apologized for "being such an unconscionable time a-dying." For all I know, the Pope might have said the same thing, although the media would have been too busy flagellating the event into a non-stop nightly news headline to report it. ("We now go live to St. Peter's Square. Okay, it's four in the morning; there's nobody there. But trust us, just hours from now it will be thronging with mourners. Stay tuned.") I don't begrudge John Paul the respect of his followers. Laying side the depredations wrought in the name of the Church over the centuries (from the Crusades to abusive priests), he was by all accounts a compassionate spiritual leader. (Although I'm still waiting for a pope humane and enlightened enough to get it that contraception is the best deterrent to abortion.)

But even after the man had passed on, the spectacle of his dying went on and on: the open casket, world leaders arriving like red-carpet celebrities on Oscar night, the crowds of faithful jammed into all the roads that lead to Rome, the orgy of lamentation. It was a Mardi Gras of death.

People die every day, in much more tragic circumstances—at war, in the streets, from sudden, incurable, and apparently random diseases. Those are deaths to be lamented. When Death steals silently into the Vatican and releases the pope in his sleep, surrounded by well-wishers, with billions of people ardently praying for his soul, that's not so tragic. It is, if you will, a blessing.

Death has two faces, but we seldom get to choose the one we prefer for ourselves or our loved ones. My robust dad, the old Navy salt, had Alzheimer's the last three years of his life. It became so debilitating that my mom and my heroic brother, Mike, were no longer able to care for him at home. They moved him into a nursing home and visited him every other day; sometimes he recognized them, sometimes not. Two weeks later, he died overnight of a heart attack. My mom still cries that she wasn't with him at the end. But I think in a way it was his final gift to her; that some last vestige of his rational self realized where he was and decided to sail on. It was a blessing.

When making that decision for someone else, it's hard to recognize the fine line between compassion and expedience. It was a little barbaric to remove Teri Shiavo's feeding tube, prolonging her death for such an unconscionable long time. But I also think it was barbaric to prolong the life of her body for 15 years after, by all accounts, she had vacated it. I don't quarrel with her death, but I wish for all concerned it could have been faster, kinder.

Pet owner assume they're going to experience the entire life cycles of their pets—which includes a commitment to letting them go when the time comes. It's choosing the moment that's difficult. We once had a cat who stopped eating, stoically removed herself to the back yard, and curled into a ball under the hedge to wait for the Paradise Express. That was a clear signal. When my intrepid 19-year-old cat Sheena wobbles right up to me and pees apologetically on the floor, is that a clear signal, or just a kitty senior moment?

We never know under what guise Death will come—the Reaper, the Angel, the seducer away from life. Maybe there's no difference between them. Until it happens to us, we can't know. In the meantime, the best defense against future grief is to cherish those we love while they can still appreciate it.

It didn't seem right to throw the little hummingbird in the trash, so I buried him in my yard under a bed of flowering succulents. Sheena had a long, undisputed reign as the best kitty in the world. When her time came, two weeks later, we gave her the best exit we could—purring in the lap of someone who loved her. Isn't that the way we'd all like to go?